Starting from the position that writing and editing are ineluctably social, and hence rife with social tensions, this paper explores the difference that interfaces make to writing in the digital age. Moving through considerations of two editing interfaces, that of SoftQuad’s now defunct Author/Editor and the current industry standard, Oxygen, it argues that their contrasting production histories are legible in the design of their interfaces. These examples illustrate the stakes and the implications of design in digital environments, even in the apparently uncontentious context of humble tools such as editors.

This workshop will introduce the CWRC-Writer editor. It will be framed by a brief overview of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) virtual research environment, and by brief introductions to XML text markup and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A demonstration of CWRC-Writer will be followed by hands-on time. The workshop will conclude with a glimpse of the larger goals to which the editor aims to contribute.

Earhart will discuss a digital activist model grounded where undergraduate students are participants in canon expansion while learning valuable research and digital literacy skills. She will discuss her recent projects that include White Violence, Black Resistance; Alex Haley's "The Malcolm X I Knew" and Notecards from The Autobiography of Malcolm X; and the Black Radicals Projects.

Anti-black racism in the Asian American community should immediately problematize the idea of hacking a white/black binary, especially as such calls desire the expansion of the model to include, via individualized narratives of Asian American "abjection”--membership within the binary --what does the need to 'expand' a white supremacist model tell us about the current politics of mainstream asian american activism? Critiques of the black/white binary, often by Asian American scholars and activists result in calls for representation of Asian American voices and bodies. This insistence on making representation the answer to Asian American struggles completely misses how white supremacy already frames the “binary”.

Only in the face of abjection, violence and struggle (which is theoretically blackness) do Asian American ask for differentiation. In this sense, model minority/Asian American becomes what Ellen Wu has theorized as, “definitely not black.” The hack here serves to reject proximation to blackness.

The only way to hack the binary is to functionalize it--the only way to functionalize it is to center blackness.

People (corporations, journalists, activists so forth) are eager to find the recipe/formula for digital hacks against global injustice. In particular, we are asked: what is the formula for 'trending' a politicized hashtag--the simple answer, the one they can't accept--is that conversations trend because people are interested in discussing the issue. It's easier (and more digestible) for people to dismiss twitter conversations as "lazy activism" or "click justice" because it's scary to think about a world in which, decolonization and the end of white supremacy is the popular movement. A world in which more and more people articulate their desires for an anti-racist, decolonial future.